At the beginning of the 20th century, British writer Hume and American writer Pound put forward the idea of emphasizing accurate image and language art, which was the beginning of new critical theory. In the 1920s, Eliot and Richards respectively laid the theoretical foundation of new criticism with the poetic concept of symbolism and the critical method of text analysis, and became their main representatives. The new critics have many members and diverse views. Their similarities are mainly: 1. From the aesthetic point of symbolism, they regard their works as independent and objective symbols, self-sufficient organisms isolated from the outside world, and are called "organic formalism"; 2. They think that literature is a special language form in essence, and the task of criticism is to analyze the text of the work and explore the interaction and hidden relationship between the parts, which is called "word meaning analysis". Symbolism provides them with aesthetic theory, and word meaning analysis is their specific comment method.
Eliot's masterpiece Tradition and Personal Talent (19 17) puts forward the theory of "depersonalization" from the perspective of opposing romanticism. Romantic thinks that poetry is the expression of the poet's emotion, and he thinks that subjective emotion is only material. If you want to enter the work, you must first go through an impersonal process, transforming personal emotion into universal and artistic emotion, and transforming experience into art. Aiming at the direct expression of romanticism, Eliot thinks in Hamlet (19 19) that "expressing emotions in artistic form" As soon as this happens ... that emotion is triggered. This is a creative method of symbolism implying feelings with concrete things, which has a great influence on new criticism's attention to discovering the hidden and ambiguous things in the text.
Richards believes that poetic language is a special emotional language, which does not reflect the objective truth (science and poetry, 1925) and that poetic words have complex meanings due to the influence of context (practical criticism, 1929), which urges the new criticism to emphasize the richness and complexity of lexical analysis and poetic meaning.
In 1930s and 1940s, New Criticism developed the theory of poetic language and the analysis of specific works. Empson's masterpiece Seven Hazes (1930) holds that the vaguer the meaning of a word, the richer it is and the higher the value of the poem. In New Criticism, Lanson thinks that the language of poetry has the characteristics of conflict between "skeleton" (meaning the logic of theme or poetry) and "texture" (meaning the artistic treatment from words to punctuation). In "Simulation-A Structural Principle" (195 1), Brooks called the revision of a statement by poetic context "simulation", saying that it is the main principle of any poetic structure. In On the Tension of Poetry (1938), Tate defined the meaning of poetry as the tension formed by the connotation (figurative meaning) and extension (logical meaning) of words. Only when the tension finally reaches balance or harmony can this poem be considered successful. In the comments on specific works, the new criticism advocates symbolism and metaphysics, and belittles Milton, Byron, Shelley and other poets. Their theories and activities paved the way for modernist poetry.